Why Rachel Held Evans is not controversial

Many in the Christianity community have followed Rachel Held’s Evan’s blogging and writing due to her journey of questioning of her upbringing within conservative evangelicalism. As a powerful female voice, Rachel Held Evanscreated a niche of disenfranchised and exiles from the evangelical community. She has taken on issues such as women’s roles in Christianity, LGBT rights, and challenging traditional evangelical doctrine.

Many on the evangelical right believer her to be a heretic. Other celebrate her ability to question the normative ethos of evangelicalism. Despite her popularity on social media, speaking tours, and as an author, Evans writing and new book, Searching for Sunday is not controversial.

Let me take a full stop here. Rachel is great example of someone who turned their questions of faith and share those questions with a broader audience. I like Rachel and admire her strength and courage. She is a faithful Christian trying to figure out her faith in a complex and changing world – as all Christians should be doing. She is a very good writer. I like her sense of honesty and humor.

In her new book, Searching for Sunday, Evans writes about her progression towards a more sacramental and orthodox Christian experience. She remarked to Jonathan Merritt of the Religion News Service,

We need to creatively re-articulate the significance of the traditional teachings and sacraments of the church in a modern context. That’s what I see happening in churches, big and small, that are making multigenerational disciples of Jesus… Every Sunday morning, I stand in my Episcopal church and join in a chorus of voices publicly affirming the Apostle’s Creed.

As book reviews rack up and Evan’s ideas pick up traction, there’s a sense in which people believe that this is a new and controversial thing: an evangelical who find meaning in sacramental expression and the “bells and smells” of liturgical Christianity. Katelyn Beaty of Christianity Todayputs together Evan’s journey into context:

Her book, part-memoir, part-meditation on the seven sacraments of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, follows a trail well traveled. Like manywho grew up in low-church evangelical settings, Evans says she’s drawn to the Anglican-Episcopal tradition for “the liturgy, the lectionary, the centrality of the Eucharist in worship, the Book of Common Prayer.” There’s also the physicality of it all; the water, the bread and wine, the bodily actions that seed faith as much as express it. “The sacraments gave me the language to name all those things I see as worthy and valuable about the church,”

Evans is not the first to make this journey, nor is she the last. Perhaps the most famous evangelical (Southern Baptist) 20th century conversion came from Rev. John Claypool, who went from low church pastor to high church Anglican pastor. The late Robert Webber (his writing changed my life in seminary), the father of “Ancient-Future” movement penned a book entitled, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church in 1985. Webber shared his own journey away from low church Christianity, to a more robust liturgical sacramental approach to faith and worship.

Growing up in a Southern Baptist Church setting, I admired (still do) Ann Graham Lotz, as one of my favorite preachers (and theologians and authors). I met her and listened to her journey as a woman preaching in conferences where men would turn their backs on her, yell at her in protest, or leave in large groups because they did not believe in female preachers or ministers. She challenged the deep theological conviction among evangelicals that woman cannot and should not preach. In college, I became an Anne Lamott admirer and reader. Lamott’s painful struggles opened my eyes to the reality of faith.

In reality, what Evans offers in Searching for Sunday and on her blog, are nothing new, nor controversial among evangelicals because those ideas and battles have already begun and are in process. The conversations in the evangelical community regarding gay marriage, ordination of women, sacramentalism, liturgical worship, and recovering ancient Christian practices are already at play. Within my own Baptist traditions, both clergy and lay persons in the American Baptist Churches and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship already embody these practices or are wrestling with these issues.

In the end, if Evan’s new book is a ground breaking proposal for a new Christian experience, then it is nothing new. It is another installment in a long line of Christians seeking to restore ancient practices. Among younger female voices in Christianity, IF:Gathering, Jennie Allen and Jen Hatmaker are making serious inroads into bridging evangelicalism with liturgical worship, faith, orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

To her Rachel I say, “Amen!” because there are many who seek to recapture historical-biblical practices of Christianity.